AMD Begins Rolling Out Driver Patches For Next-Gen GPU IP Blocks

As part of AMD's recent Linux graphics driver development approach of enabling new GPU support gradually on a IP block-by-block basis rather than big monolithic patch series marked by colorful fishy codenames, it's worked out well for getting new hardware support rolling into the kernel early and without revealing any combined details on yet-to-be-released graphics processors. This week has seen some new IP block patches surface.

With RDNA3 and the latest CDNA accelerator work AMD Linux graphics driver engineers have been successfully managing the new hardware support by sending out the individual "intellectual property blocks" of the GPU independently and then properly enumerated by the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers.

One of the new AMD graphics IP blocks this week is PSP 14.0. While a big version bump, so far PSP 14.0 is following the same code paths as the PSP 13.x within the AMDGPU driver for the GPU's security-related tasks.

Separately there is also a patch series for IH 6.1 support fhr that interrupt handling code. That IH 6.1 enablement is more involved than just following the existing code paths.

There is also HDP 6.1 and SDMA 6.1 and SMUIO 14.0 support while in those cases they follow existing driver code paths.

It will be interesting to see where these new IP blocks are ultimately found with existing AMD graphics processors already supported by the upstream open-source Linux AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers. In any event it's great seeing AMD continue working on upstreaming their next-gen hardware support early. This though is just the start of the new IP blocks so expect more enablement patches soon.